The Understudy - David Nicholls

Sometimes novels don't quite work. They really ought to, but at the end you are left with a vague feeling that the author missed an opportunity to write an entertaining, satisfying relationship novel, and instead wrote three quarters of one. This was Nicholls' second book after 'Starter for Ten', which has a single white young man as its central character, through whom we see the events of the novel, as does 'The Understudy'. While the protagonist in 'Starter for Ten' is relatively easy to identify with - he is fallible, but charming (although I am not sure female readers would agree) - the central character in 'The Understudy' is far less engaging. For a start Nicholls has given him a silly name - Stephen McQueen - and the joke "Stephen with a ph" wears thin pretty early on. Each time it was repeating I was reminded of the fact that as an aspiring actor he would have adopted a different professional name after about 30 seconds. He is dishonest, unsuccessful, profoundly so, divorced, and quite bitter about his lack of success. 

I am not sure if we were supposed to identify with McQueen, or find him in any way endearing, but I didn't. He is manipulated and walked all over by Josh, the obnoxious character he understudies (if Josh is a portrait of anyone Nicholls knew in real life, they should sue!). Nobody really likes him, his life is a complete mess, his pursuit of acting success at the cost of his marriage is quite clearly pointless, rather than noble, and while the novel ends with him recognising that, failure isn't entertaining or funny. He does - kind of - get the girl - but the attraction is really hard to understand or believe, and only the abrupt ending prevents us from seeing the inevitable rejection. I suspect Nicholls' made Stephen so unlikeable in an attempt to avoid the standard rom-com clichés, but he didn't follow this through - the character may be creepy and unloveable, but the situations he finds himself in are predictable and lame, all informed by a self-consciousness and determination to demonstrate that this isn't 'Love Actually', actually.

The plot revolves around McQueen's part as an understudy in a successful stage play about Lord Bryon, in which Josh has the lead. Each night McQueen has little to do except hope Josh is ill or has an accident, which he never does. Josh invites him to a party - and the comedy set up here is that Josh is actually asking him to help out as a waiter, while Stephen thinks it is an actual invitation. I saw that coming a mile off, but it doesn't make sense - if you are having a party professionally catered, you don't supplement the staff with vaguely worded invitations to casual acquaintances. That gives you a good flavour of the comedy incidents that are scattered through the novel, and which aren't really that funny. Nicholls does his best, and there are plenty of drinking to excess, unsexy sex scenes, and theatrical failures - but its all a bit laboured and predictable. As an example, Stephen accidentally steals (whilst drunk) a BAFTA trophy from Josh's flat. You know that the chances of him returning it with an apology, anonymously if necessary, are nil, this being a relationship comedy. So it's just a question of when, not if, this theft is discovered, and sure enough, the award is found at the back of a wardrobe just in time for it to be used as an impromptu weapon.

'One Day' and 'Starter for Ten' have both been made into reasonably successful films, and my suspicion is that 'The Understudy' would actually make a better film than a novel. Some of the physical comedy would work better - for example the scene with Stephen dressed up as a squirrel for a children's 'How to count' film, which he has lied about to his family, describing it as a crime drama - and some of the dead wood could be pruned. But if you are looking for a follow-up for 'One Day', 'Starter for Ten' would be a much better (forgive me) starter for ten.

A Clockwork Orange - Anthony Burgess - 1961

'A Clockwork Orange' is narrated by the main character, Alex, a teenage boy in a near future but very recognisable society. Alex leads a gang of ultra-violent thugs, who every evening rape, murder, steal, and commit crimes with impunity. Alex really enjoys this aspect of his life, and the casual nature with which he describes his crimes is chilling. This effect is compounded by several other features of the novel - his age, his love of classical music (which poses the question how could one love music and yet be a monster) - but principally through the use of nadsat, an invented teenage slang. Burgess had noticed that teenagers adopt a specialist argot to confirm membership of their tightly knit group (which of course is the whole point of slang) and writes almost exclusively in this language. Alex can speak conventional English, and does so when the occasion requires (when he is pretending to be civilised, usually in furtherance of a crime) but his language of choice is nadsat. Just to give a flavour of this:

"There was me, that is Alex, and my three droogs, that is Pete, Georgie, and Dim, Dim being really dim, and we sat in the Korova Milkbar making up rassoodocks what to do with the evening, a flip dark chill winter bastard though dry. The Korova Milkbar was a milk-plus mesto, and you may, O my brothers, have forgotten what these mestos were like, things changing so skorry these days".

Don't let the apparent impenetrability of the language put you off - most words can be understood from their context - droogs here being gang-members for example - and even where the exact meaning is not immediately apparent, the overall meaning is usually very clear. The use of an alternative language reinforces the sense of alienation Alex and his droogs feel for the oppressive society they live in.

Burgess tackles several big themes in this novel. Violence and the degeneration of society - Burgess looks at the gang culture of post-war Britain, and anticipates it getting more prevalent and extreme. Free will is another central theme - once imprisoned, Alex is treated, brainwashed, so that any attempt at violence makes him feel immediately unwell, reducing him to a clockwork orange i.e. something apparently natural, but not so). In an aside, it is mentioned that the Government needs this treatment to be effective, to create more prison space for an anticipated influx of political prisoners. Language is also central to the novel, not only to express Alex's alienation, but also that of his peer group - teenagers literally talk a different language from their parents; Burgess also notes that some ten year old girls that Alex picks up and brutalises speak a different argot - so each group is developing its own language. Burgess isn't critical of this - he seems to accept it as inevitable, and while nadsat may not be the language of Shakespeare, it is creative and very expressive, both in its adoption of new terms (I particularly like the term "horrorshow" for "extremely") and rhetorical phrases such as "Oh my brothers".

Burgess undoubtedly wrote better books than 'A Clockwork Orange' - I have written here previously about my love for the Enderby novels for example - but none made a bigger impact, either at the time of publication, or more infamously with Kubrick's film adaptation. The principal accusation is that the novel (and the film) glamorised and celebrated violence. There are certainly aspects of the novel that could justify that claim. The language used to describe violence reflects Alex's enjoyment of the same:

"And, my brothers, it was real satisfaction to me to waltz-left two three, right two three-and carve left cheeky and right cheeky, so that like two curtains of blood seemed to pour out at the same time, one on either side of his fat filthy oily snout in the winter starlight"

The novel ends with Alex recognising that he is growing up, and there might be a future for him in settling down, getting a normal job, and raising a family. It is a strange, downbeat note on which to end, and apparently this final chapter was omitted from the American version, and the film adaptation. While the novel positively fizzes with ideas it is not, however, didactic - I doubt if anyone ever had their ideas or lives changed by it. I recognise that this may not have been Burgess's intention - he once described the novel as "a sort of tract, even a sermon, on the importance of the power of choice" - but if it is, it is an unconvincing one. Would we really prefer pre-treatment Alex in his raping, murdering, ultra-violent glory to compliance, obedient post-treatment Alex? Yes, the loss of freedom of choice is painful, but so is the lawlessness and anarchy Alex creates when free. That of course is an entirely academic debate - the Ludovico treatment is fictional - so it is hard to get too exercised by the issue. Instead, the film generated a more pressing debate on whether portraying violence in a glamorous way can incite it. The relationship between film violence and criminality is not actually raised in the book - Alex not once attempts to justify his behaviour by reference to anything he has watched - in fact his cultural interests are completely high-brow.

Given a choice between more time in the bleak, post-war urban landscapes of 'A Clockwork Orange' and the wit and erudition of Enderby, and I choose the lonesome poet every time.

Wonder - R.J.Palacio - 2012

'Wonder' is an American children's novel about August "Auggie" Pullman, and 11-year-old living in Manhattan. Auggie has a rare medical condition giving him a severe facial deformity. Until now, Auggie has been home-schooled by his mother, but the book opens at the point his parents decide to enrol him in a private school. It charts through a series of first person narratives his first year at senior school.

The book has become something of a word of mouth success, and I can certainly see why. It is incredibly heart-warming - a classic story of an outsider overcoming adversity. It is full of positive, reassuring aphorisms such as "funny how sometimes you worry a lot about something and it turns out to be nothing” and "When given the choice between being right or being kind, choose kind".  

If the novel had just followed Auggie through his first year at school through his eyes only, the narrative might have become stale, but Palacio adopts an interesting structure to avoid this. After each few chapters the narrative baton is passed to another character. This person then recaps the previous events from their perspective, giving a new version of events, then takes the story forward. This structure keeps things moving, and together with the very short chapters, most no longer than three pages, often fewer, the books 250 odd pages zip by.

The author has some real insight into the challenges of living with a condition such as that Auggie has, and shows this in various ways. As an example. Auggie has been growing a braid for several years, similar to that worn by trainee Jedi apprentices in the Star Wars universe. In a symbolic act of growing up he cuts this braid off, in an attempt to gain acceptance from his schoolmates. All children, whether living with a disability or condition, or not, will have experienced similar pressures. Auggie is shunned by some of his classmates, bullied, spoken about behind his back, but with the support of his family, friends, and teachers, he overcomes, and ends the year with a school medal for bravery.

Auggie has an older sister just starting high school. She experiences similar challenges - fitting in, dealing with the cool kids, starting dating etc - which gives the book a broader appeal than the 9-12 year olds that will be the majority of its readers. But I suspect the book will not have a wider cross-over appeal into the adult market (despite it being chosen as a book group read according to some of the Amazon reviews I have looked at), unlike, say, 'The Curious Incident'. It is, despite its subject matter, simply too safe and saccharine. Almost everyone is just so nice. Yes the kids shun Auggie at first, but ultimately it is the instigator of this treatment (Julian) who is the loser, and end up leaving the school. There is a scary piece of bullying by some 13-14 year olds at the end of the novel, but these are brushed off relatively easily, and end up paying the price. Auggie starts wearing a complicated hearing aid part way through the school year, which in any other school would have been the start of a tsunami of jokes about androids and aliens, but in the privileged halls of Beecher Prep goes without comment. The book lacks any serious menace or peril.

Despite these reservations, I would recommend the novel for any child about to change school, or faced with a challenging difference. They will find it reassuring and if just one child is persuaded to be kind instead of mean, it will be worth it.

A Single Man – Christopher Isherwood – 1965

‘A Single Man’ is a portrait of a single day in the life of George, a lonely, late middle-aged Englishman living in Santa Monica and teaching at a university in LA. George is gay. Thus far, thus autobiographical. George has in the recent past lost his lover, Jim, in a car accident, and is slowly coming to terms with his loss. We follow him and his internal monologue through the course of a day as he gets up, drives to work, presents a lecture to a very diverse group of students, and then goes to the gym, all the while narrating his progress, and simply holding it together. One gets the impression of a man on the edge, terrified of growing old and being alone, conscious of the need to keep his sexuality, still taboo in America at this time, secret, but equally being struck by lust several times during the course of the day. He needs to grieve, but is unable to do so – indeed, he has told his neighbours that his ‘friend’, Jim, has simply moved away, rather than acknowledging his death and having to respond to their condolences.

This was brave stuff for a novel in the 1960’s. Homosexuality was illegal and while attitudes across America varied widely, and still do, Isherwood references some of the struggles gay men faced. (Remarkably, while gay marriage is not legal in the USA, “as of April 2014, 17 states either had not repealed their laws against sexual activity among consenting adults, or had not revised them to accurately reflect their true scope. Often, State laws were drafted to encompass other forms of sexual conduct such as bestiality, and no attempt has been made to separate them. Fourteen states' statutes purport to ban all forms of sodomy regardless of the participants' genders. Four states specifically target their statutes at same-sex relations only”) (With thanks to the wonderful Wikipedia, which knows all).

George is, in his grief, alienated from his environment. His students are “the male and female raw material which is fed daily into this factory” (ie the university) (page 32). He only really comes to life when sexually aroused, by the lithesome tennis players he sees, or when exercising in the gym next to a desirable if dangerously young man.  

There are some difficult scenes where Isherwood/George describes his disgust with the female body, including his dying ‘friend’, Doris, previously a short-term lover of his partner, Jim. He remembers her as:

“that big, arrogant animal of a girl…With that body which sprawled stark naked, gaping wide in shameless demand…gross insucking vulva, sly ruthless greedy flesh, in all the bloom and gloss and arrogant resilience of youth…I am Doris…I am Bitch-Mother nature.” (75)

There is plenty more in this vein. You could read this as George hitting out in his grief at someone who tried to steal his partner from him, but the visceral nature of the description reveals a nastier strain of misogyny. Heterosexuals generally get quite a hard time – children are described as appearing “litter after litter” (9) and even ‘Children at play’ traffic signs are seen as sinister. This is the interior narrative of a bitter sad, single man. His anger and resentment of the heterosexual families that encroach on his bohemian community is understandable, but nonetheless unpleasant.

George’s day, and the novel, concludes with a wild, improbable and drunken midnight swim, and finally with a heart attack, a gloomy, hopeless ending to a sad and bitter life. ‘A Single Man’ is an important landmark in gay literature, and is economically, sparsely written, but it has a sadness which made me quite glad to be leaving this world. Isherwood’s earlier novels may have been less polished that this, but they had an optimism and hope missing here.

Missing Terry Pratchett

It is rare that going into a bookshop saddens me, but it did so last week. Going into any half decent bookshop in December any time in the last 20 years or more inevitably meant encountering a large pile of the latest hardback DiscWorld novel - the easiest item on my Christmas list. But this year it was missing, a big gap - no more Librarian, no more Sam Vimes, the world's best policeman (someone should do a spin-off series featuring Sam, solving crime in Ank-Morpork, with the aid of his raggle taggle army of recruits), no more Veterinari, no more Granny Weatherwax or Ogg. Really sad.

Sister Carrie – Theodore Dreisser – 1900

‘Sister Carrie’ follows a young woman as she travels from her small town life at the age of 18 to the big city. At first she lives with her sister and her sister’s husband. She struggles to find work, and succumbs, quite easily it has to be said, to the blandishments and an attractive and smooth talking young man, who sets her up in a small flat of her own. To provide this scandalous situation with a veneer of respectability they pretend to the neighbours that she is his wife. Bored with this arrangement she begins a secretive romantic liaison with another man. Dreisser loses interest at this point – I have read that he abandoned the novel several times before finishing it – and so injects some liveliness by having the second boyfriend, Hurstwood, rob his employers of $10,000, and flee across the border into Canada, taking Carrie with him. He almost immediately regrets this, pays back most of the money, and moves to New York in hope of finding an income. Carrie plays housewife, but when the money dries up she takes a job on the stage, eventually finding fame and fortune. Her boyfriend finds only poverty and destitution, and eventually kills himself in despair.

How this novel possibly found a place in the Guardian’s top 100 novels written in the English language I will never know. It has so many deficiencies, from the misleading title (the ambiguity between Carrie being a sister, and having nun-like tendencies, offers possibilities which are never explored); the tedium of the length at which poverty in Chicago and New York is unrelentingly described; and the almost complete lack of characterisation. After 500 pages we still know very little about Carrie’s thoughts and feelings, beyond a vague interest in shoes and clothes. She is a profoundly superficial and uninteresting person, and when her stage career takes off we share no delight on her behalf. This list just scratches the surface of the novel’s weaknesses, but there’s little to be gained from any further demolition of what he till now been a justly forgotten novel.

‘Sister Carrie’ caused a minor scandal on publication, because while she has affairs with men who are not her husband, she does not suffer any consequences from this, remaining unpunished by the fates. But her affairs are loveless, joyless things. Dreisser is unable to look too closely at the dynamics of these relationships – sex is barely hinted at, and the reader is simply left to infer that it probably happens at some point. She drifts into the relationships unenthusiastically, and they end with an equal lack of passion or drama.

Are there any redeeming features here? The portrait of urban America is convincing – you can certainly believe that Dreisser has walked the cold, dirty streets of Chicago and New York, looking hopelessly for work, queuing for handouts, and sleeping in filthy rented rooms for a few cents a night. There’s no hope offered for his characters – this is simply a portrait, not an analysis. There is no way out other than suicide. An interesting section clearly dropped into the novel follows a bus-drivers strike, shown from the perspective of a strike breaker. The strikers are portrayed sympathetically, but so are the scabs, and only the police get a hard time. This plot line is quietly dropped in favour of yet more street walking and hunger.

 

The Picture of Dorian Gray - Oscar Wilde - 1891

I know I don’t normally write about the publication history of the books I review, but the background to this one is more complex than usual, and quite relevant. It was published in full in Lippincott's Monthly magazine in 1890 (in a significantly shorter version than the final novel). Wilde predicted "I think it will make a sensation" - which was a bit of an understatement. Prior to publication he made several edits to remove some of the more explicitly homo-erotic content, but he may as well not have bothered, because critics almost unanimously put two and two together, identified Wilde with his two main characters, and realised that some of the sins which they explore included gay sex. For the avoidance of any doubts Wilde drops clunking hints such as when he says "there are certain temperaments that marriage makes more complex...they are forced to have more than one life" (61) What can he mean? Later he refers to “such love as Michael Angelo had known, and Montaigne, and Winckelmann, and Shakespeare himself” (96). This was extraordinarily daring of Wilde – and his publishers - and he was of course to pay the price.

The plot is very familiar. Gorgeous, young, well-to-do and well-connected Dorian Gray has his portrait painted by a society painter, Basil Hallward. Dorian unknowingly makes a Mephistophilian pact to preserve his beauty, and for his portrait to bear the signs of aging and sin. He is taken in hand, and led astray, by Hallward’s friend, the dangerous Lord Henry Wotton. His treatment of a young actress, Sibyl Vane, who falls in love with him and who he brutally rejects, leading to her suicide, is the first time he notices a change in the painting. Gray is psychopathically narcissistic – everything is judged by its impact on him. He goes to the opera after hearing Sibyl has died, and when chastised for this says “Don’t talk about horrid subjects. If one doesn’t talk about a thing, it has never happened” (87) Accepting his fate, he hides the painting, eventually killing Hallward to avoid exposure, and dives into a life of excess, sin, and hedonism. Wilde goes as far as he can to describe this life, dropping hints about many of the elements, including some more conventional, heterosexual affairs, which frankly is fooling no-one.

There’s a unavoidable biographical element to this novel. Wilde’s own life followed the same self-destructive arc as Gray’s, although what is more remarkable is that the novel came first – Wilde was well aware where his recklessness would lead, but embraced his fate in any event. He foresees it all – the social ostracism (“when he used to reappear again in society, men would whisper to each other in corners, or pass him with a sneer, or look at him with cold, searching eyes, as though they were determined to discover his secret” (113) – the damage caused to friends and relatives – “Women who had wildly (note the choice of adjective) adored him, and for his sake had braved all social censure and set convention at defiance, were seen to grow pallid with shame or horror if Dorian Gray entered the room” (113), the damage to his health and (he believed) his soul, and yet could not steer a different course.

There are four great 19^th century English horror novels (that is, novels written in English)  that explore identify and sexuality – ‘Frankenstein’, ‘Dracula’, ‘Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde’, and ‘The Portrait of Dorian Gray.’ (In many ways ‘Dr Jekyll’ is probably the least flawed of this quartet, and I will aim to review it shortly to complete the set). All are in their different ways about the horror of the divided self. ‘Gray’ has many flaws – the sections where Wilde expanded the text for publication as a novel show strong signs of padding, for example, and the aphorisms, which individually are witty and clever, when they appear in such intensity have an artificial, false note. But despite these, this is a stunning novel, tragic in the light of what we now know about Wilde’s own fate, but also complex and brave. Superficially it is a parable about the price of sin, but in making Gray and Wotton such charismatic characters Wilde makes it clear where his sympathies and interests lie.

Slaughterhouse 5 - Kurt Vonnegut - 1969

I've written elsewhere on the mysterious process that is re-reading a novel. The experience ranges from a comforting stroll down memory lane, to the more common "I know I have read this, but for the life of me can't remember a single thing about it". Slaughterhouse 5 was for me definitely a re-read, and I had a dim recollection of the main elements of the plot, if you can call it that, but the primary experience was as close to a new read as makes no difference.

'Slaughterhouse 5' is a strange novel. It follows the life and times of time traveller, World War 2 survivor, and alien kidnapee, Billy Pilgrim. Billy experiences time as a continuum, and travels from point to point across it freely, making this an exceptionally fractured novel. “It is just an illusion here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone, it is gone forever.”Breaking that down into a "what happened" narrative requires the imposition of a more formal, chronological time scheme and would be misleading; there is a collection of events spread across time that is revealed to us, the reader, but only a limited attempt to present this in any sort of order. In a classic post modernist manner, Vonnegut explains “There are almost no characters in this story, and almost no dramatic confrontations, because most of the people in it are so sick and so much the listless playthings of enormous forces. One of the main effects of war, after all, is that people are discouraged from being characters.”   On reflection, however, I think I may have overstated the impact of the fractured time scheme on the narrative flow of the novel - there is underneath all this jumping around in time nevertheless a reasonably steady progress of the central narrative, from Billy's capture as a prisoner of war, his transport across Europe to Dresden, to the final horror of the fire-bombing.

There's also an incongruous comic book silliness to much of the novel - at one point Billy is captured by aliens and displayed in a zoo, for example. However, the seriousness is never far away, giving the reader an unsettling experience of stepping from genre to genre in the space of a few lines. 

The title of the novel refers to the refuge Vonnegut used to survive the Dresden firebombing of 1945. He unequivocally portrays this as an horrifying act of violence, but doesn't take sides - the reader is left to draw their own conclusions about the morality of the raids. He quotes the figure of 135,000 deaths in the raid, which was accepted, to a point, at the time, but is now know to be a politically motivated exaggeration of what was nevertheless a massacre. Had the Allies lost the war the Dresden raids would undoubtedly have been treated as war crimes. Some of the horror of this event is shown, but it is mainly mitigated by insistence of the philosophy at the heart of the book, that bad things are best not dwelt upon, as they are always going to have happened; far better to focus on the good. This is best summarised in the fatalistic chant of the novel, "So it goes".

As a classic post modern meta-narrative, Slaughterhouse 5 is as much about the process of writing a novel as the events described. As is now quite common, but at the time was much more original, the book contains its own review:

 

"There is no beginning, no middle, no end, no suspense, no moral, no causes, no effects. What we love in our books are the depths of many marvelous moments seen all at one time.”
Which is as good as a summary as I am going to find. One footnote - this novel contains a passing reference to "The Red Badge of Courage", another American novel about war, and also one of the top 100 Guardian novels. So it goes.